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Wow, all of my secrets revealed so clearly.
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To quote you in another thread:
“Whether something is attainable enough is not a good metric for whether it should be the goal. What is right or wrong doesn’t depend on whether or not it’s inconvenient or difficult. Accepting horrendous evil, simply because it’s firmly rooted in place remains a stance of moral and ethical bankruptcy.”
It is absolutely a specter that should be “stuffed back into its prison”. The age of the capsuleer needs to come to an end. There should be no such thing as an independent capsuleer. No capsuleers at all would probably be better, considering what we are capable of, but at the very least there should be no capsuleers allowed to operate outside of strict, direct CONCORD or empire control.
Revoke the Capsuleer Pilot Act and all related policies. Shut down cloning services, end blueprint licensing, and restrict military-grade hardware for sale and use by private space-goers.
We are unable to accomplish anything good or right with the “power and tools of destruction at our disposal,” short of interdiction of external threats like pirates and drifters and sansha and rogue drones. Maybe that is something good, something where we actually benefit the cluster. But frankly, that should be the responsibility of professional military forces, not independent contractors.
You became an independent capsuleer by choice. So did I. You wanted, maybe, the freedom to act to change the world without the restrictions imposed by military service. I simply wanted freedom, and only thought, and fought, for a short while when I thought I actually could make a difference.
Our nations don’t disown us. We disowned them. Every independent capsuleer had, or has, the opportunity, if not the qualifications, to sign on to the navies. But the chains of actual service are too strong for you. They would hold you back from doing anything you would consider meaningful. So you go independent, because at least then you can try to do something. It’s not about being disowned, it’s about the power to enact change. As independents, we can to a point. We have reputations and mountains of money, that can be invested planetside in the same way as any high profile person. But the empires restrict us still from making any grand changes to them on our own whim. They shouldn’t give us that power, though! For every one potentially noble capsuleer, there are a hundred absolute monsters who would use that power to do evil. The empires should cut us off, and they should be far more harsh with it than they are today.
No one with this much power, should be afforded this much freedom.
To your conundrum? No, capsuleers are out there fighting senseless wars because war is what they enjoy doing. How many of those people do you really think would care about the empires? Very few. Those few who do care, only care as a means to slake their bloodlust (see the Pendulum War). They aren’t out there because the empires don’t give them purpose, they’re out there because they thrive on the freedom to be monsters.
I don’t.
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Like they say: Don’t hate the players, hate the game.
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But how long would that last, Ms Kernher? As soon as one of the interstellar empires saw an advantage in having independent capsuleers in the mix wouldn’t they make it possible again? Wouldn’t other empires follow suit just to keep up? I’m not sure how enforceable that would be.
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I’m speaking about universally binding treaties, like the current capsuleer acts already are. Not something an empire can follow or not on its own whim.
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The same vested government and corporate interests that created the independent capsuleer in YC 104 upon successful mating of trans neural burning with a hydrostatic capsule are still in force today, so there is no reason to think that it will not remain business as usual until it is no longer in those interests.
We still test new weapons, ships, and systems on each other; we still deploy infrastructure on the frontiers; we still suppress outlaw organizations; and we still commoditize violence as part of a new war economy.
The disappointment many such as Kernher feel is just the sting from the misled belief that governments and corporations factor in morality or lives in their decision making as it applies to independent capsuleers.
Our utility to power still far outweighs the slaughter of millions – after all, we just kill the poor, and really who cares about them compared to job creators like us?
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Ha, it is a bold plan Ms Kernher. Perhaps too bold? Would it necessarily solve what you’ve identified as the problem, or just move it to a new arena?
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Anything that limits the power of capsuleers helps to solve the problem. If it doesn’t, then there needs to be even more restrictions.
It’s not about being misled. It’s a condemnation of them and a demand that they do factor those things in.
But they won’t. Greed rules mankind.
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Well yes. Which is why when topics like this come up from time to time and the “difficulties” of trying to find a moral or ethical path in the face of all the blood and violence being an independent capsuleer entails it becomes an amusement.
There is no difficulty in my mind; if you truly, really, cared about the morality and ethics you would find ways not to participate at all.
Really, how hard is that?
Even if that means, like with you, that you have to watch while monsters like me happily soak my hands in blood at least you’ve stuck by the principles you’ve espoused.
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I feel like I stick to my principles fairly well. Surely others can figure out how to do that too. The fact is that most independent capsuleers completely lack principles to begin with.
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Well if you want to think that the people who slowly die in the vacuum of space would thank their killers for their sense of principles, sure why not?
It’s just talk while the zero sum remains the same.
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The difference is that my principles limit who I bring that zero-sum result to. Overall, it’s far more focused and smaller in number than with most capsuleers.
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Then if your principles allow you consider that a smaller number of people killed vis-a-vis other body counts is better than not killing at all then that’s your rationale to do so which is one among many to justify participation in the system of being an independent capsuleer.
I suppose I could add, “limit participation” in addition to not participating at all, as regards personal principles but I really did not have the principles you might or might not personally espouse when I was formulating a response to Kernher.
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Suddenly taking free capsuleers out of the picture is a surefire recipe for economic disaster. Horrible genocidal monsters as we may be, we’ve developed enough that the cluster would be worse off without us.
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The cluster will adapt to our absence. However, they will have to also suffer from all the inefficiencies of mining, logistics and etc without us around. Life will be slower and those who enjoy life in the fast lane are going to be grinding their teeth for decades to come.
And of course, if shite hits the fan, wars will be far bloodier.
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I don’t think our utility is purely economic in the sense of production or logistics. A lot of people point out we kill, but there’s less talk of who we kill. The crews of capsuleer ships are drawn almost exclusively from those every Empire would rather forget or get rid of: The non-entities and disassociated in the State; the denizens of Delta and Omega cities in the Federation; the lowest of the lowest classes in the Empire; the refugees and the outcast of the Republic.
They are all people that present economic issues because they have to be supported on universal basic incomes, welfare programs, and indentured labour that really isn’t all that productive. If not that, then criminality out of simple desperation.
We take all of them, the desperate and the destitute, and we eliminate them en masse with the survivors managing to return with potentially some decent wad of ISK that makes them less of a burden to their societies. Then all the Empires can continue their individual narratives about how their society and government is best, because look there’s so little people unhappy or in poverty – because we killed them all.
All in all an efficient method to get rid of all the undesirables.
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It sounds very cold and ruthlessly efficient. Which makes it, somehow, better?
Maybe the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough to go around, but that we’re not utilizing our available resources suffiently? From my understanding, there’s several times more material resources within a single medium sized moon than there is in all of the asteroids in most systems. My understanding is probably insufficient in this area though, so I’d have to defer to those who have studied the matter.
What I’m getting at is, if we are clever enough to secure sufficient resources, then the economic part of the problem is eliminated, or at least greatly reduced. We wouldn’t have to kill people off just to maintain our economies.
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Point here is we aren’t actually needed, but very few people want to cut us out because we are just so convenient to have around.
Quite a bunch of hypocritical little bastards, the lot of us.
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People don’t live on some arbitrary x amount of material resources. What matters is how those resources are extracted and who owns the means of that extraction, production, and manufacture into usable goods. All the CONCORD signatories operate on capitalist economies, and it is those who have the capital to own the means of production that benefit most from the monopoly over supply that they create.
The downside to this is that you end up with a lot of poor, sure, but that’s where we as capsuleers prove useful. Becoming an independent freelancer is to strike a Devil’s Bargain; we are afforded the status, privileges, and power that only the exorbitantly wealthy can ever hope to achieve so long as we participate in a capitalist system that perpetuates the economic inequality, repression, and deaths of billions.
You can justify it however you might want to; in the end it doesn’t matter so long as you participate and perpetuate the system created.
It’s because we’re rich, and so are those in charge. However yes, quid pro quo and all that.
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